Hole in the Middle

by Kendra Fortmeyer

  I drop my phone into my bag, trying to shake the unsettled feeling as I force myself up and across the lawn. It’s peaceful here: the air is laden with the breath of roses, so quiet that it’s hard to believe there’s a world outside, let alone a city.

  I lean into the doorbell, and the door swings inward almost immediately, revealing not the latest maid, but my mother. Exhaustion clings to her face in the small lines that she is having difficulty shaking lately: small scraps of tiredness around the lips, creeping into the eyes. She’s wearing yesterday’s suit.

  “Morgan,” she says too loudly, with a trademark five more push-ups smile. “How are you?”

  Mother does not smile off-camera. My sense of alarm sharpens.

  “Who’s here?” I ask. “I need to talk to you.”

  “What a fantastic sweater,” she proclaims, and her voice drops. “For once. Come in; I have somebody for you to meet.”

  I follow her across a black-slate foyer the size of a five-car garage, filled with moodily lit black-and-white portraits of biceps, thighs, abs. Above the slightly sour smell of sleeplessness, a new perfume rolls off her skin: ambergris and neroli and faint hints of jasmine. Celestia, or maybe Electra Complex.

  “What’s going on?” I ask. “What did the doctors say? Mother? Mother. Can we at least take a minute to talk about how I’m on all of the Internet?”

  “In a moment,” Mother says. “First, we need to discuss your gallery show.”

  “My what?”

  She buffets me into the living room, a high-ceilinged dream in glass and steel. The furniture is sleek, spare, a closer modern to cutting edge than midcentury, all accents of charcoal and cream. Floor-to-ceiling windows drink in the crisp October light, casting a glow on the only bit of color in the room: an emerald-hued oil portrait I did of Mother, hanging in an alcove. It looks grossly out of place in this shrine to steel.

  “Marcel, this is my daughter. Morgan, this is your new manager, Marcel Jasper-Banff.”

  The man rises and extends a hand. Feeling like I’m underwater, I take it.

  He is small, immaculate, his palm soft. He moves precisely through the space, constantly framing himself: The Manager at Work. The Reluctant Handshake. Thinker, Refusing Acai Juice.

  “I’ve asked Marcel to produce a show for you,” Mother says, extending a thick green smoothie in my direction. She gives me a reproachful look when I wave it away. “Really, Morgan, you’re in no position to pass up the retinoids. Anyway, it’s not that I don’t think you couldn’t break out on your own. Eventually. Probably. If you ever put in the focus. But the early application deadlines for RISD and the Pratt Institute are about to pass us by, and given the attention you’ve been receiving in the press, we think you can spin this—”

  “Mother, stop. Stop. I need to talk to you about what Doct—” I pause, glancing sidelong at Marcel, who studies the window. Small Man Wonders What He’s Doing Here.

  “Marcel’s up to speed on your media debacle and health situation,” Mother announces. “That’s why he’s here.”

  I close my eyes and breathe the ionized air and accept the fact that my mother is an insane person.

  “Okay,” I say. “Great. Let’s just step off the crazy train for a second.” I turn to Marcel. Caught in the Crossfire, #3. “I’m sorry, Marcel,” I say. “I’m sure you’re a decent human, and I’m sure my mother is paying you an obscene amount of money, but I’m having a lot of feelings right now, and there are a few things I need to talk with my mom about that aren’t my professional development opportunities.”

  “Morgan,” Mother says. Her voice is cold. “This is a prime opportunity.”

  “It’s not an opportunity. It’s my life fucking exploding.”

  “Morgan, language.”

  “Mother, completely inappropriate response to an emotional crisis.”

  “I understand that it seems like a radical connection,” Marcel speaks up. His voice is high and light, velveting the room. “But Alanna is right. This would be . . . the most effective way for us to spin the attention you’ve been receiving into a springboard for your art career.”

  I glare at the side of Mother’s face.

  “Please,” Marcel says. “This will just be a minute.”

  He crosses to a glossy binder, flips it open with a finger. The pages open to a double spread of works I recognize as mine from early last year, when I had just learned about abstract expressionism: an unsteady blue circle hovering in a field of green, an angry slash of yellow vivisecting the remaining white.

  “You’re a developing talent,” he says. “If we had the time, I’d want to send you to an intensive program to refine your technique a bit before—”

  “But we don’t,” Mother says, pointedly.

  “No,” Marcel agrees with a small, compact sigh. “As it is, you have a number of solid pieces. Possibly sellable in smaller galleries.”

  Despite myself, and my annoyance with Mother, my heart leaps. I do? I am? Like, you can spend every day of your life thinking of yourself as an artist. But it is nothing, nothing like hearing it from somebody else.

  The rustle of wings.

  Someone seeing me—seeing me—almost burst into flight.

  Marcel goes on. “But your portfolio isn’t”—he gestures, shaping the air into something I strain to see before he drops his hands again, leaving the space between us formless—“cohesive.”

  “So cohere it,” Mother says.

  Marcel frowns. “This is your debut in the art world,” he says, speaking to me directly. Despite myself, this makes me like him. “We’ll need to shape this exhibition. Is there a common theme your work speaks to? What do you want to say? What’s important to you?”

  Belonging. Being able to step outside without starting a riot. Setting Dr. Morse’s hair on fire.

  I open my mouth, and Marcel looks at me expectantly, all soft hands and expensive suit. I feel paralyzed, close my mouth again. Mother sighs through her nose.

  “Think it through,” Marcel says. “Let’s meet later this week with a list. Look through your catalog—it would be ideal to develop a show from preexisting pieces. We could put up some new work, but your mother doesn’t want the opening any later than Black Friday—”

  “The day after Thanksgiving?” I say, distantly.

  “That’s the one.”

  “That’s, like, two months from now.”

  “Seven weeks,” Mother says. “Really, though, it’d be best to meet that November first deadline—”

  Marcel tips his head back and forth, weighing, with a slightly pained expression. “Not if we want to generate buzz. Either way, it would be risky. Get me a list based on the pieces you have, and we’ll go from there.”

  Seven weeks. God knows where I could be in six weeks. Cured. Dead. Touring with Ripley’s Believe It or Not! I want to laugh. But not, like, funny-laugh. Like: the-patients-have-taken-over-the-asylum-laugh.

  “What about school?” I ask.

  She waves a hand dismissively. “Oh, you’re absolutely not going to school. Not until this blows over. We’ll take a medical leave. Not,” she says, as if I’m about to jump up and down like a little kid on a snow day, “a vacation. You have to keep your grades up. I’ll have someone deliver your assignments to you.”

  “Mother,” I say again, softly. “Slow down. Every single piece of my life is exploding. I’m not ready to jump into Having a Career. And I—I don’t even know if I want to go to college next year.”

  I don’t even know if I want: the padding cowards use to cushion their hearts’ desires.

  “Of course you do,” Mother says. Her voice is firm, but she’s not looking at me. I follow her gaze to that little green portrait I did of her last Christmas. An out-of-place splotch marring Mother’s otherwise perfect world. But, I realize, she’s not hiding it. She displays it proudly, even
though it clashes with the sleek, pristine life she’s worked so hard to create.

  I’m suddenly grateful she won’t look at me. My mother and I have spent my whole life building up emotional ramparts to weather each other’s storms. If she knows I saw this tenderness in her face, it would rip us both wide open.

  I pull in a heavy breath and turn to Marcel. “I’ll work on it,” I tell him.

  In my periphery, I see Mother’s shoulders straighten, settle.

  “Perfect,” Marcel says. “We’ll talk in a week. Good luck with the press. Try to keep your head down.”

  He shakes my hand once more, and I think I see a quick frown of disapproval—Spoiled Rich Girl, Destroying Integrity of the Art World—before he turns and lets Mother show him out, leaving me alone with the incoherent catalog of my so-called life’s work.

  There’s the month I did nothing but still lifes of porcelain foxes. That spring of wood-block prints. Mother’s cataloged them all and kept them, stockpiling my work as though collecting a body of evidence. For what, I am not sure.

  I feel her gaze on the side of my face as she returns and stands in the doorway, and I wonder when our relationship became about nothing more than my problems and the heaps of money she threw at them. I wait for her to ask how I’m doing, to tell me that it’ll be okay, that she’s suing Dr. Morse and that she can fix the Hole in my stomach with the strength of motherly love. But when I look up, she’s disappeared into the frozen bowels of the great house, and I am alone, holding the pages of the life she’s saved for me, trying to find some story in it.

  21

  Back at home I try to paint, but I’m not feeling up to it. My life feels too dramatic; anything I create too likely to be overwrought. I put in some effort trying to write Marcel a list of artistic-sounding things I could care about: Interplay of Color. Ephemerata. Art as a Product of ___________, but the more adult I try to be, the more I feel like a kid playing Very Pretentious Dress-Up. I spend the rest of the afternoon hiding under the bed, watching the minutes leak past while my classmates are elsewhere, shouting and bumping one another in the corridors, chewing on pencils, watching other clocks.

  I wake up sometime in the waning afternoon hours, my phone buzzing and glowing zeke by my face. My boss from the co-op. I groan, groping through the dusty dark. I’ve definitely missed more shifts in the last few weeks than should be allowed by law. I probably owe Simple Earth money at this point, just on the pure employee-shittiness scale.

  “Prithee, Morgan,” Zeke proclaims when I answer, his theatrical accent booming in the hollow echo space below my bed. “It pains me to say, but it’s probably wisest if you didn’t come in tonight.”

  For a boss, Zeke is everything you want in a Ren Faire nerd: man bun, drinking horn, chuckling use of wench until I “accidentally” stomped his instep while refilling the kombucha keg. We’re cool. Unless he’s firing me right now. Which would be justified, but extremely not cool.

  “Zeke—”

  “Look,” he says, sounding harried. “I don’t know what’s going on, you know, with this whole medical thing. ’Tis your family’s affair. But I do believe you’d be better off not coming in again until this whole thing dies down.”

  His voice subsides into a fuzz of noise. And then I hear a voice, male and distinct, shout, “Hey, is the Hole Girl here?”

  “Oh my God,” I say.

  Zeke drops his voice, his lofty accent faltering. “I won’t lie,” he says. “It’s not bad for business. The premade deli wraps are pretty much wiped out. Some of these people have been waiting around all morning.” He clears his voice and says to someone else, “No, we’re cash only. Cash only. There’s an ATM around the corner.” To me, he says, “Alas, I’m sorry, Morgan.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “Thanks.”

  I lie beneath the bed. I know there are calls I need to make, the calculations of being an adult. Caro will promise to cover rent, but she’s saving for college a year earlier now, and I don’t know how she’ll do it. The thought of asking Mother for money makes me feel ill, and the thought of moving back home makes me feel worse. I stare up at the bedsprings, watching them spiral up, and my life spiral out of control. My phone beeps shrilly as I set it down. voicemail full, the screen alerts me.

  I sigh, punch in the code.

  You have FIFTY new messages, the automated voice announces. First new message:

  “This is Alex Ramirez from the Daily—”

  “John Marcus from H.R. Abrams Med—”

  “Miss Stone, I’m Belinda Johnson, features columnist from—”

  “We were wondering if you could come in—”

  I press delete until I’m tired of the feeling of my finger on the button and drop the phone on the floor. It immediately lights up again, a new incoming call from another area code I don’t recognize. I leave it there, glowing, to ring itself out silently into the shadows.

  Public Scrutiny has posted a dancing Doctor Who GIF with a server maintenance message, its meager servers overwhelmed by the sudden attention of the world. My Facebook is inundated with messages and friend requests from people I’ve never heard of—reporters and researchers and freak finders and fans. I don’t even bother checking my email.

  I chop vegetables for dinner, the Lump Boy’s quote from the article dancing around my ears: What if I were put on earth to meet this person? How epic it sounds. How Twilight. As if a simple fact about my body—something about me that I didn’t even choose—could give a stranger the right to insert himself into my destiny.

  I chop faster, annoyed at him and the gleeful media and the swooning public for creating this narrative and placing me unwillingly at its center. This isn’t how destiny happens in the movies. There’s girl-meets-boy-and-he’s-perfect. There’s also girl-meets-boy-and-they-hate-each-other-at-first-but-their-hatred-is-sublimated-sexual-attraction-and-then-they-get-together-and-it’s-awesome-and-hot. (Also, girl-meets-girl, because lesbians, holla!) But there’s not girl-meets-boy-and-he’s-okay-she-guesses-but-they-have-nothing-in-common-and-she-feels-creeped-out-by-his-body-so-anyway-it-must-be-fate.

  “Whoa,” Caro says, entering the kitchen with Todd. There are vegetables heaped on every surface: onions, tomatoes, okra, peppers, squash. One lone shallot teeters on the edge of the stove, then plummets to the 1970s gold-and-rust linoleum below.

  “Hi, honey,” I say cheerily. “How was school?”

  “Oh, you know. Scholastic,” she answers. She kicks off her shoes: Toms that I found at the Salvation Army and painted tiny giraffes on. Behind my back, I feel her and Todd exchange a look. “What’s for dinner?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I say. “But it needed lots of chopping.”

  “It smells great,” Todd says, dutifully.

  Caro just nods, goes to the pantry and begins measuring out brown rice. There is something eggshell fragile in the way she crosses the room, like she’s afraid to touch my body. She rummages among the dry goods for a while, then asks, too casually, “You’re . . . not planning on coming back to school tomorrow, are you?”

  “Mother doesn’t want me to,” I say. “So probably.”

  Caro pours the rice into a sieve and begins to rinse it. “You know, she may have a point.”

  My radar goes off. I set down the yam I’m mutilating. “Caro, why are you agreeing with my mother?”

  “Let’s have a contest,” she says. “Who can come up with the most outlandish excuse for Morgan to miss school? Like, she’s been selected to appear on American Ninja Warrior, and she has to go train.”

  “Caro.”

  “Or: tomorrow is a super obscure Jewish holiday honoring beekeepers. Okay, your turn.”

  “It’s baseball season,” Todd suggests.

  I reach over and turn off the tap. Caro blinks up at me guiltily. The water scatters from the grains of rice like diamonds.

  “Guys.” I tur
n to face them both. “What’s going on?”

  Caro sighs, rustles in her back pocket for her phone, then holds up a picture: Principal Crowell standing at the edge of school property, hands on hips, glaring down a man with a giant-lensed camera.

  “They’re not allowed on school property,” she says before I can speak. “But still. People are talking. A lot.”

  “People like who?”

  Todd, all in shades of gray, looks up from the log cabin he’s building on the kitchen table with carrot sticks. “Everyone,” he says. “Apparently.”

  Irrelevant Feeling #813: your shit is hitting the fan, and all you can feel is annoyed that your best friend told her boyfriend about it before she told you.

  Caro’s shoulders slump.

  “Everyone,” she echoes. “Even the teachers. You can tell in the way they shut down the conversations. Emmeline heard there was some huge faculty meeting about it.”

  “So?” I ask. “You said yourself everyone would find out eventually. And the press isn’t allowed on campus, so I’m pretty safe there.”

  “But . . .” She hesitates.

  “What?”

  “The reporters have been harassing everyone. Someone must have leaked our email directory . . . I mean, some people are refusing to talk to them, and Celeste Martin gave this impassioned speech in the cafeteria today about the right to privacy, but all kinds of people have been giving interviews. It’s pretty bad.” She tries to force a laugh, but anger shines through. “Random people kept stopping me in the hall all day and asking when you were coming back, and if they could get your phone number for like”—she draws mincing air quotes—“‘You know, just to see how she’s doing.’ Stacia T. and her flunkies even waited for me outside a bathroom stall to ambush me with an ‘invitation’ to sit at their table at lunch.”

  She shakes her head. “I’m not trying to complain, Morgs. I know this is three million times worse for you. I just wanted you to know. It’s nuts out there.”

  I realize I am gripping the handle of my knife very, very hard.